Viceland to bring online ad strategies to broadcast TV

Viceland, the TV channel from Vice Media LLC and Rogers Communications Inc. that launched Monday, plans to bring a branded content advertising model that has been more common online to traditional linear TV. In addition to traditional 30-second ads, the channel will air Vice-produced, “alternative types of advertising,” David Purdy, chief international growth officer at Vice, said in a phone interview. That includes ads like an 11-minute spot the company produced for Heineken, which, according to Vice’s website, showcased “Heineken at the heart of nightlife culture” by profiling individuals in the nightclub scene and designers working on “the nightclub of the future.” Purdy explained in a pair of phone interviews that the ads will be made by Vice’s own advertising and marketing agency, Virtue, in the company’s Toronto studio. The work that comes out of Virtue “sometimes” has the Vice brand and logo attached to it, though the ads aren’t “disguised as editorial” and Vice journalists and documentary makers aren’t involved in the creation of the advertising, he said. “It’s actually quite overt and it’s tongue and cheek,” Purdy said. He added that Vice has been producing these types of ads “for years.” Rick Brace, president of Rogers’ media business unit, said in a phone interview that the ads will be “editorially relevant” to the content on the channel. He added that right now, “it’s bit of a wait and see, but I think if 30 per cent of your population is millennials … advertisers will begin to flow.” Rogers $100 million joint partnership with Vice, announced in 2014, is aimed at a younger demographic of millennials aged 18 to 34 and includes the launch of the linear TV channel, which began broadcasting early Monday. Vice told the CRTC during a January hearing that it was moving into traditional TV to reach advertisers it wouldn’t be able to otherwise, who aren’t putting money into digital advertising. Purdy told a CRTC panel at the time that: “it sounds a bit crass, but absolutely we did it for the money. We felt that with traditional advertisers, we weren’t getting our fair share of auto, of banks, of telcos. There’s a bunch of advertising categories that we think we can do more business with if we’re on a traditional TV platform as well.” In an interview last week, Purdy said the Vice-produced advertising “will be less intrusive and more fun than many traditional 30-second spots, in that sense it’s a better experience for our viewers, our fans and customers.” He said such advertising “creates a greater level of engagement because it’s in the right tone and manner that the viewer will be more likely to watch it, and more likely to think fondly of the brand that is involved.” Vice might differ from its competitors because Canadian broadcasters don’t typically have in-house advertising agencies, but there is some precedent for what Vice is doing, because such models are more common online. Independent broadcast analyst Kelly Lynne Ashton noted in a phone interview Monday that the digital audience is already used to “branded entertainment” on digital platforms. “They’re used to web series whether they’re fiction or factual, and these things have been going on online all the time,” she said. It makes sense that Vice is the company moving these digital models to linear TV, instead of traditional broadcasters. “People would expect Vice to do innovative things as they move from the digital to the mainstream broadcast, that they would take what are evolving content models from digital platforms and experiment with them on broadcast models,” Ashton said. It would be more of a departure for mainstream broadcasters to start putting branded content in their ad blocks, “because they have not been experimenting that much.” Ashton added that Vice is attempting to create content that will engage the audience as a solution to a problem broadcasters are facing, where the audience doesn’t want to sit through advertising. “People are skipping over the ads, they’re PVR-ing, they’re going to other platforms where there are no ads,” she said. — With reporting by Shruti Shekar at sshekar@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Viceland to bring online ad strategies to broadcast TV

Broadcast | February 29, 2016

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Viceland to bring online ad strategies to broadcast TV

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